Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) (Jean-Luc Godard: 1959).
Former "Cahiers du Cinéma" critic Jean-Luc Godard debut is the arguable cornerstone of the French New Wave - an enormously influential film and a seminal study of existential longing and betrayal. Godard's direction was innovative and iconoclastic. He disregarded the formal conventions of narration: he minimized exposition, leaving the characters' motivations to the viewer to analyse; presented a fragmented narrative; shifted the tone to alternate commedy with tragedy, realism with melodrama: and paid no attention to consistency in shot duration. Most striking of all was his use of "jump cuts", Godards clever solution to the problem of editing a film that was over 3 hours in length .... Jean-Pierre Melville commented, "the result was excellent, instead of seamless continuity, Godard unsettles the viewer by agressively linking unmatching shots to propel the action, indicate a passing of time and convey the characters disjointed lifestyle." (JR. Paris)

 

The Loves of Ondine (Andy Warhol / Paul Morrissey: 1967)
An 18-year old Joe Dellessandro walked right off the streets and into film history when Paul Morrissey asked the teenager who stopped by to watch filming to step into the scene. Joe steals the film by stripping down to his jockey shorts and wrestling speed-freak Ondine in a Greenwich Village apartment. Unavailable on video at this time, "Loves" is frequently screened at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Morrissey and Warhol continued their collaboration with the trinity: Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972). With stylistic nods to Warhol's experiments, and Morrissey's desire to tell a story, the films were shot quickly without formal script with most of the dialogue improvised by the stars of Warhol's Factory. Underground film classics all, these films not only introduced cinema to slice of street life, but it did so by fleshing out the flesh and transcending exploitation.

 

 

Don't Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker: 1965)
The rock and roll documentary that launched a thousand imitations, D.A. Pennebaker's loose shooting style and focused interviewing paved the way for films of this nature. D.A. Pennebaker's trademark cinema verité approach and deeply thorough perspective captures the paradoxical Dylan alternately in moments of confrontational belligerence and contemplative repose, all within the framework of the pop culture hurricane of one of the most publicized concert tours of the mid-1960s - Dylan's 1965 tour of England. As the tour progresses, a pattern in Dylan's modes of expression emerges, offering a precocious glimpse of what would be a constant in his career: his perpetual redefinition of himself. DON'T LOOK BACK preserves not only Dylan's musical genius but his inimitable, vital, and profound defiance of definition.

 

 

Performance (Nicolas Roeg: 1970)
Chas (James Fox), a low-level gangster, fouls up a job and finds himself on the bad side of the Organization. Suddenly on the run, he starts looking for a place to hide. He's given refuge in the home of reclusive, aging rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) and his lovely sidekick Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) by pretending to be a performer himself. Upon the innocent ingestion of mind-expanding mushrooms, he finds his beliefs and his sense of identity completely undermined, as Turner and Pherber try to discover exactly what Chas's performance is hiding. Awash with ambiguous and graphic sexuality, inventive camerawork and lush 1970s velvet-and-mirrors production design, PERFORMANCE trips along to a rock and roll soundtrack while asking the heavy questions of identity and gender which society at large was asking after the explosive excess of the 1960s.